Spotify starts the long march to justify charging

I'm a huge fan of Spotify and am loving what it's doing to the music industry - turning the whole access vs ownership debate on its head. I also love the fact that it's free.

Of course, they run a paid for service, at a tenner a month, and it was always seen that the only tangible benefit being removal of ads. Until now.

Spotify are finally starting to justify charging for what is essentially a free service, minus the odd funny ad for Suitopia. This week they announced that those who've stumped up the cash will get a higher bit rate encode - 320 kps Ogg stream, instead of 160 kps, as well as a number of new benefits to be announced / rolled out soon.

This announcement is ripe for fuelling another timely debate - that of the ISPs and bandwidth. With everyone bitching about BBC's iPlayer drinking up as much bandwidth as they can throw, now that Spotify is essentially supplying a double thick stream of audio, how long before the ISO bandwidth complainers have them in their sites too.

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• Spotify launches 'CDquality' streaming for premium users (telegraph.co.uk)

PRS unveils new streaming rate

It's only taken the closure of Pandora's UK operation and YouTube banning music videos in the UK for the PRS to sit back and reassess the amount they charge companies to stream audio over the internet.

The Beeb are reporting today that as of 1 July 2009, the PRS will drop the rate per song from 0.22p to 0.085p. This should come as great news to not only Pandora and YouTube but also to other burgeoning services that offer streaming for free, and count advertising as their sole method of income - services like Spotify or Last.fm (in the UK at least).

Worryingly, the Beeb reports, "In 2007 [the PRS] published the proposed rates and there were a number of services who objected and so it went to the tribunal, who fixed the rates for a two year period."

It's still fantastic to see that the old school music industry, as late as 2007, was still running scared and playing catch up with the emerging tools and routes to market available via the Internet.

The PRS announcement today further fuels the argument of access versus ownership, as the cost of access continues to decline.

Pricing oddities and stuff

Upon hearing the news that Woolie's online shop has dropped the price of their downloads to 67p, I thought I'd go over to their website and take a looksie.

All in all, everything seems to be in order. Although, they purport to sell "singles" for 67p. What they actually mean is single tracks. You're not getting videos and b-sides and remixes for your sub-pound purchase.

Most albums are also priced at the more favourable £6.80, which - for a 10 track album - actually works out to 68p per tracks, but we won't bitch about a penny.

Funnily enough, checking out the new Lemon Jelly album, the site is still charging £9.35 for the downloadable version, even though you can buy each track seperately for 67p... and if you do, I'd suggest leaving off the first intro track, it's only 24 seconds and doesn't really do anything... that way too, you get the album for £6.03, saving a whopping £3.32 off the lazy "click one button to order the whole download album" price.

Link: Lemon Jelly and the price discrepancy